A former Tesla scientist who helped build the intelligence behind Elon Musk’s Optimus robot wants to do it all again from Paris, only this time for Europe. Rémi Cadene, chief executive and co-founder of the startup UMA, has unveiled plans for a lightweight, AI-powered humanoid called Northstar, Bloomberg first reported.
he machine is being designed for manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses, and eventually homes. Cadene told Bloomberg that UMA is already in conversations with about 50 potential customers about how they might put it to work, and that Europe comes first before any push into the United States or Asia.
That framing matters, because the continent has spent the past year trying to prove it can win the humanoid race rather than cede the field to American and Chinese rivals. Cadene is not the first Optimus alumnus to strike out alone either, following others who left Tesla to build dexterous robot hands and rival systems.
Cadene’s own CV is arguably the strongest thing UMA has going for it. He spent roughly three years at Tesla, from 2021 to 2024, working on the AI behind Autopilot and building the first neural networks for Optimus, before joining Hugging Face to lead LeRobot, the open-source toolkit that became core infrastructure for robot learning worldwide.
